Run, Kat, Run and Encantado Dreams (Mortality Bites: Publisher's Pack Book 4)

by Ramy Vance

After a moment, he stepped back, both hands on my arms. That furrow returned to his eyebrows, and then he got upset.

  “That’s what you have to say after all this time? ‘Good to see you?’ Kat, I’ve been freaking out. You haven’t been in your classes, you haven’t been on campus, you haven’t responded to my emails. Your phone has been off. You just disappeared, and you never even called or texted or sent me a single word to let me know you hadn’t died.”

  Really, Kat? I thought. Then, Who am I to judge Kat’s choices? But she did leave me in a tight spot.

  My mouth opened, but I didn’t know what to say. Blood rushed in my ears, my heart like a drumbeat, and my brain’s circuitry felt completely inefficient, sparking in all the wrong places.

  “I …” I began.

  But before I could answer, I was saved by the sounds of shattering glass and screaming students as the biggest wolf I’d ever seen in my five hundred years burst into the dining hall.

  Chapter 3

  Justin and I stared, both frozen, at the creature that had just exploded through a pane of glass and stood bristled and red-eyed at the front of the dining hall.

  Most of the half-asleep students took a second longer than normal people would to respond, and then the first scream broke out. With that, more pairs of checkered pajamas than I’ve ever seen at once were rushing toward the exits.

  Instead of fleeing like the others, Justin only grabbed my hand. “What the hell is that?”

  I squinted at the creature. It resembled a wolf, but many times as large; its spine probably cleared ten feet at the crest. And its eyes glowed such a fiery red, it reminded me more of a hellhound, or…

  “Lobisomem,” I whispered, and immediately ducked us under the dining table. We were at the back of the room—trapped, without any nearby exits—and anyone who could had already taken off through a side door or scrambled into one of the hallway.

  Which left just a few people huddling under tables—and me and Justin.

  Justin turned to me. “What did you say?”

  I looked over at his beautiful, ignorant face. “It’s death. We need to get out of here.”

  He shook his head. “If it’s death, we need to help these people. You and I need to fight it.”

  “We can’t fight—“ I began, and stopped sudden. “You and I,” he’d said, like this was a familiar thing. “What do you mean, 'fight it?' ”

  “You know, like as Cherub.” He mimed sliding a mask over his face and stabbing the air with a knife. “Well, mostly you fighting it and me cheering you on.”

  I stared at him. Katrina Darling was that girl I’d seen in the cherub mask? Over the past few months we’d had some crazy things happen on campus, most involving monsters, and during one of those events I’d been walking through campus when I saw a girl in a cherub mask rush by with a pack of … superheroes behind her.

  As in, Avengers-style, fireball-shooting people in costumes and capes.

  So Kat wasn’t a normal college freshman, and that wasn’t just because of her style and her perfectly coiffed hair.

  A low, rumbling growl emanated from the front of the dining hall, and from beneath the table, I could see that the creature—could it really be a lobisomem?—was slowly crossing in amongst the tables.

  And it seemed to be sniffing. I heard the distinct sound of a snout sucking in air, tasting scents.

  Fear rose up my spine like ice water. What was it scenting for?

  The lobisomem was a creature of South American lore, most popular in children’s stories told after nightfall. Most humans didn’t believe it was real—and I hadn’t, either—but a single detail of the stories I’d heard stood out to me as too great a coincidence.

  They were summoned creatures, called into this plane to bring death to anyone their summoner marked as prey. And lobisomem were singularly capable when it came to scenting magic.

  Or more specifically, the use of magic. They could smell it from a hundred miles.

  I had used magic just a few minutes ago. And my illusions were sustained by it. But this lobisomem was something more, something different than the stories I’d heard ... This one seemed to interfere with my magic. I stared down at my hands, terrified.

  “What is it, Kat?” Justin asked.

  My gaze lifted to him. “Do I look different to you?”

  Another growl issued from the far end of the hall—it was near the bathroom now—followed by more screams and pounding feet.

  “This isn’t really the time, babe,” Justin said.

  Putting aside the fact he’d called me “babe,” which made my heart beat faster than it already had been, I scooted closer to him. “This thing is too dangerous for us to fight here,” I breathed into his ear. “We need to get out of this building, and maybe we can lure it away from the other students.”

  He nodded. “Good call. How?”

  A trash can fell over with a loud clang, and I flashed a glance over my shoulder toward the hallway. The creature's tail disappeared around the corner. Was he following the scent of my magic? “We run,” I said, pushing Justin out from under the table.

  We bolted for the front door of the dining hall, though I moved awkwardly in my boots. My feet were smaller than they had been before, which didn’t couple well with heels.

  I stumbled, and Justin caught me. (What a hunk, I thought for the briefest of infatuated moments.) The closest exit was the floor-to-ceiling window the wolf had crashed in through, and Justin ran us straight out through it, our feet crunching over the broken glass.

  That was a mistake. As soon as we ran over that glass, a snarl sounded from down the hallway. We spun right and tore down the sidewalk, and the wolf of Amazonian legend blasted out of the dining hall after us.

  It skidded to a stop, and I thought maybe we’d fit in with all the other students running for their lives. But then it let a howl so loud they must have heard it throughout the entire province, and the wolf clawed the pavement with gravel-crunching power as it leapt into motion after us.

  Lobisomem was on the hunt now.

  ↔

  “Which way?” Justin yelled.

  “Here.” I hooked a right and took us down a narrow alley. The creature wouldn’t be slender enough to follow us through here—or so I’d thought.

  Ten seconds later, the ground rumbled as it leapt onto the roof of the building to our right, and I heard the pounding of its paws as it ran behind us … twenty feet up.

  I ventured a glance up and back, spotted those red eyes staring back down at me, the lips curled into a snarl. Those canines were as long as my newly reshaped forearm.

  “Don’t look up,” I breathed, already totally winded.

  “I hadn’t planned on it.” To his credit, Justin seemed to be fine when it came to lung capacity. He was an athlete, after all. He pointed some twenty feet ahead of us, where a door led off into a building. “Underground?”

  He was pointing to an entrance to Montreal’s underground mall and tunnels, which ran throughout the campus and the city. I had an acute map of them in my head because, in my Brazilian hatred of the cold, I’d used them all the time.

  The lobisomem wouldn’t be able to get down the narrow stairwell, and even if he managed to, navigating that space would definitely slow it down.

  “Underground,” I agreed.

  We darted left, our shoes tapping hard on the stairs as we plunged down the passageway. A woman carrying a shopping bag in each hand trudged up the steps in the opposite direction, and I yelled, “You’ll want to use a different exit!” as we barreled by.

  We hit the tiled floor at a run, and we didn’t slow. Behind us, a massive thud sounded as the wolf presumably leapt down into the alley. The woman we’d passed let out a scream, and I glanced over my shoulder.

  She had dropped her bags and was careening back down the way she’d come. Behind her, the creature's head and forepaws were trying to press inside the entryway to the stairwell. But he was stuck. He let a frustrated howl conveying as
much, and the sheer loudness of it made me clap my hands over my ears as we ran past stores and shops.

  We took the first turn we saw, which led us left and deeper into the tunnels. “I think … we’re safe,” I panted.

  Justin wouldn’t let go of my hand, and he kept pulling me on. “If a semester of fighting monsters and nasty Others with you has taught me anything, it’s that you should never stop moving when you think you’re safe.”

  “Then you’ll have to go on without me,” I said, gasping for breath. I stumbled, and he finally ducked us into a lingerie shop. We nearly knocked over a scantily clad mannequin as we tumbled in, and the attendant—half-folded panties in hand—stared at us with wide eyes.

  “It’s her birthday,” Justin said, navigating us past the attendant, “and she’s really excited to get her present.”

  I raised a hand as we passed, my cheeks about ten degrees hotter than the rest of me, and the attendant offered a wan smile before she resumed folding.

  When we got into the back, we stood next to a rack of teddies and, breathing hard, stared at the store’s entrance. Far off, I could hear the howling and some vague screams. But they didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

  “Is it still coming?” Justin whispered.

  “Maybe?”

  As soon as I’d said it, the howling stopped. We waited in a held-breath stasis for four or five minutes, but everything seemed to have returned to normal. Well, more or less.

  There was still this fact: a creature of Amazonian legend had appeared in Montreal, and had chased me across the campus and into a Victoria’s Secret.

  Justin turned to me, and I to him. And before I could say anything, he wrapped his arms around me and pressed me into a kiss so delicious my thoughts slipped back into Portuguese.

  After a minute or an hour or a day, a voice filtered in. “Can I help you two with anything?”

  Filho da puta.

  Justin pulled away with a soft laugh. “No, thanks.”

  But I just stayed right where I was, my lips parted. That had been the best kiss of my long, long life. (A little hyperbolic, sure, but we encantado live in the moment.) My eyes slowly drifted to the attendant, whom I might have burnt to the ground if my gaze were capable of such a thing.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to save that for elsewhere.” She winked at us as she turned away.

  “Well,” he said, lowering his hands to hold mine, “I think we’re safe to leave.”

  I nodded, and we walked together out of the store and through one of the far exits. In the tunnels we saw the remnants of the lobisomem’s presence—a candy display knocked over, someone’s coat dropped as they fled—but an attendant was already righting the display, and people were back to their shopping.

  No screams, no howling. How quickly mortal terror shifted back into mid-morning errands.

  “Do you think we ought to go back?” I asked.

  Justin shot me a look. “Why?”

  “We could see what’s up—maybe it’s still stuck in the stairwell.”

  “Like a dog in a kitty door?”

  I suppressed a smile. “I guess.”

  “As funny as that would be, absolutely not.”

  “I thought you wanted to fight it.”

  “Yeah, when we were cornered,” Justin said. “But that was only because we had no other option. Look at me, Kat—what would I fight with, anyway?”

  I’ll admit it: I took the opportunity to look him over before I said, “Point taken.” We headed in the opposite direction down the tunnel and climbed another set of stairs leading back up to the city.

  When we came into the daylight, I fully expected my face to be the recipient of two sets of angry claws, but nothing hit me except a wave of brittle cold.

  Out here, the day went on, and the world went on. And so did we, Justin and Katrina, except we walked much faster than two lovers normally would. We walked like we were being followed.

  “Your place?” he asked.

  I gritted my teeth, shook my head. We definitely weren’t going there. “Can we go to yours?”

  “Sure, it’s just that you don’t usually like to come to the O3 house…”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Okay.” He took the lead. “What did you call that thing? Lobo?”

  “Lobisomem,” I said, scanning ahead of us and behind. Everything still seemed normal, but wolves weren’t loud creatures … until they were. They were quiet predators when they needed to be. “It’s a creature of South American legend. A hunter.”

  “How do you know that?”

  My eyes flicked to him. Maybe Kat shouldn’t know such things. “The Other Studies Library,” I said. “I’ve been on a creatures of South American lore kick lately.”

  “Of course you have,” he said. “Wait, but when did you get back to Montreal?”

  “I mean, I was on a kick before winter break,” I corrected. The more we talked, the more things seemed to be gumming up. Names, dates, places, people. I began to realize how little I actually knew about Katrina Darling. If only he’d asked me what color my hair was, or what desk I sat at in English 101. But he wasn’t going for the easy questions.

  So I did something I had been wanting to do for months. I threw my arms around Justin, pressed my whole body to his, and pulled his face down. When our lips met, I parted his with my tongue, and I felt his body stiffen before it relaxed into mine.

  I had felt this before. Many times. During my centuries of immortality I had fallen in love with hundreds of men, and they with me. Or at least, most had fallen into an all-encompassing passion with me.

  I was always a beautiful young woman. It was the gender I associated myself with, as all encantado are biologically female. You see, legend and lore have it wrong about us … encantado have never been male. That’s our blessing, our curse: we’re the superior gender, but we can’t reproduce with male encantado because there are none, and human men can’t impregnate us, either.

  We’re functionally barren.

  But that fact has never made me any less desirous of men.

  While some among us didn’t prefer them, I always had. Oh, how I preferred them. There’s a reason Michelangelo sculpted David. The human male form, properly developed and cared for, is unmatched.

  The other part of the encantado curse is our predisposition for obsession. Sometimes—once every few decades—we’ll see a man, and then we won’t be able to see any other man until we’ve been with that one. And by “been with,” I don’t just mean in the physical sense. I mean the whole shebang: physically, emotionally, spiritually.

  Often, we aren’t able to break that obsession until that man dies. It’s more or less how humans define “love,” and it had happened to me a dozen times over hundreds of years, though never since the gods had left.

  Not until now. For me, Justin Truly was one of those men.

  When I pulled away, he stared at me wide-eyed.

  “Take me back to your place,” I whispered.

  Chapter 4

  I didn’t see any of what we passed on the way into the O3 house. There might have been other rooms, and there might have been stairs. I also remembered something about a door he pushed me up against on our way into his bedroom.

  And there also might have been a killer wolf still out there, hunting the two of us. But for the next hour, we didn’t properly exist in Montreal. We occupied a half-place where I only knew touch and taste and smell, and all of it felt like too much and not enough.

  Which is to say, I nearly killed the man.

  Afterward, he lay sprawled across his bed, panting. “You ...”

  I smiled, propping myself on my elbow. One finger traced figure eights on his chest. “Me?”

  “Those things you did,” he said, half-delirious. “The part with the tongue and the earlobe. And then you bit me.” He lifted his head to inspect his shoulder.

  “You seemed to like it.”

  The blue eyes turned to me. “Kat, that was … u
nreal. It was like you, but not you.”

  My stomach flipped, and I said nothing. I placed a delicate kiss on his lips before I lay back on the pillow and cast my eyes around his bedroom. Neat, orderly, if not a bit gender-stereotypical: lots of deep blues and dark-stained wooden furniture and some football awards gleaming off the walls.

  “Where did you learn those moves?” he persisted.

  “A lady never reveals her secrets.” But the truth was: he wouldn’t like the answer. Men didn’t often like knowing that their woman had gained her intimate knowledge elsewhere, from another.

  At least, not the men I’ve loved.

  I sat up to pull on my panties and top. Beside me, a window streamed in the last dregs of light. It would be nighttime soon. If there was one thing I remembered from the legend of the lobisomem, it was that the night was its habitat. Prime time for hunting.

  Justin’s hand slipped it around my waist, pulled me back toward him. I shrieked as I slid up against his body and he pressed my head to his chest. “I want you right here.”

  I conformed myself to the shape of him, pressing my head into the hollow of his shoulder. “Right here is pretty nice.”

  He stroked my shoulder. “That thing is still out there.”

  “It is.”

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. And I honestly didn’t. All I wanted to do was enjoy Justin, to forget that anything existed outside the frame of this bed. It was immature, irresponsible, and I didn’t care.

  So I did the thing that makes all men forget whatever it was they were talking about. And when I did it, Justin’s eyebrows rose, he turned his face to me, and we sank—or slid, or glided—into the second show of the evening.

  Maybe, I thought, just maybe it’ll disappear. Maybe the lobisomem had been unsummoned. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this, and Justin and I could just forget about it all.

  That was the thought I fell asleep with, while outside the moon shone like a gleaming quarter over our heads.